Answer for:

can anyone suggest if any such software exist with similar functionality?

Message 2 of 5

I've read your abstract and get the idea. I do have to comment on your statement on saving electricity. Though I am 100% in favor of a green infrastructure I would not make it a huge requirement unless you're operating in a true remote site (i.e. a mobile unit). in other words your servers and the infrastructure in general will consume far more than your laptops will even if they are just sitting idle (although the current Dell PowerEdge and HP ProLiant's do have impressive power management built it, you still lose performance).

That said, how are the "downloads" being done? It seems like they're very large or you don't have broadband speeds; this in response to your statement of your users having to monitor the downloads and it being tedious.

What are the client machines? PC and or Mac? What OS are they primarily running? Also what sort of "downloads" are these?

A few years ago I had a server with a lot of disk storage sitting in another site (a sort of coloc). It would "go to sleep" until around 1am where it was scheduled to wake up (using the built in OS scheduler) and execute a batch file which would ping a remote server (to ensure it was there and to initiate the VPN tunnel/connection) followed by launcing robocopy using the /MIR command.

When the copy was done it would send an e-mail (using a command line utility called "bmail.exe") with a confirmation that it had completed. It would also attach a log file generated by robocopy.

The server would then go back to sleep after x-minutes of being idle.

No commercial software was used.

If I ever needed to get to the server while it was in "sleep" mode, I could gain access through the iLO port (it was an HP Server).

My point of that was just an example of having to do something similar to what it sounds like you're trying to do (if that makes any sense :) ).